


composite

by skeletonprowler



Category: I Am In Eskew (Podcast)
Genre: Unrelated chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:33:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 9,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23581648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skeletonprowler/pseuds/skeletonprowler
Summary: A few sentences on each episode. Probably.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	1. correspondence

**Author's Note:**

> Eskew episodes literally won't let me rest until I write something for them  
> these are my thoughts on my first listen thru. slow going as I can only listen to one a week else i catch fire

ohhh is this what you’ve been saying? about being seen? being seen for your ability to care? to be singled out just for your capacity of devotion? devotion to their love, or your love - 

does it matter?

if its their love, to ask nothing of it, just to witness and be thanked for your attention - if its your love, to be asked to merge with them as you are and be something greater?

you can barricade your door after, if you like. it was the furious weeks that mattered. it mattered that you were there, and that they know you cared.

still care, years later.

still care too much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is just an earlier draft of a [post](https://laymanterms.tumblr.com/post/613163384041537536/ohh-is-this-what-youve-been-saying-about-being) i made after losing my complete mind at this episode.  
> 


	2. reproduction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the architect was the only one that walked the halls.  
> It turned out that didn’t mean anything.

You sit in the bar, the changing patrons and din so different from the white walls of your enclosure, but just as strange. The man across from you asks, then doesn’t. You sit in silence until the corners crawl out of your mouth, folding across the space between you, tugging his crumpled shirt into neat rectangles. He follows you homewards but you don’t look back. It doesn’t matter that he’s within the walls alongside you - you would still be here. That’s what’s important. The mantra follows its old tracks in your white walled head. Art needs a spectator. The gallery needs you. The gallery chains you to its undulating uniformity - and you deserve it.

A kind of hell that should be worse.

And suddenly it is. You stare at the black marks on the blueprint. The heart has been marred. By him. It _had_ mattered that he was with you. The familiar paths are longer, now. Like the gallery wants to keep ~~you~~ longer. Keep him longer. You are angry, angrier still when he refuses to follow his own rules, marches down the four steps to the lobby. He ignores its shape, its hand trying to cradle him. He cuts through it like a hammer in his want to leave. You don’t want to leave. But the gallery doesn’t want you.

His dark stain byproduct watches you with grinning disinterest. It only looks at you because you’re not him, like not being him is the closest you’ll get to significance. It hadn’t thought enough of you to show itself before. Straining towards his retreat, it crushes you. You are devoured not like a meal but like nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you liked the feel of this episode I highly recommend Stalker, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky  
> the bit about throwing the receipt into the room first was very Stalker-esque.


	3. excavation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> earth as a metaphor for incompleteness and sky as a metaphor for finality.

  
the complete blue arches above us, us on the surface.

we haven't made a decision.

some have, and they toil. perhaps in the soil, perhaps under the loyal

outstretched arms of sister Agnes.

outstretched she is, and as she talks her arms encompass those who listen

and the sky.

her hands stop at the surface.

she can't, or doesn't, reach my brother.

he scrapes at the soil in the garden night and day, never nearing anything.

he can't, or doesn't, hear us.

  
one morning he's gone. I follow the blood to the garbage pit.

I don't want to say he belongs there but what's left of his knees slot nicely into place.

he ruins his rest, though, with his hands.

I only watch him, unmoving, from the fence line.

is his action preferable?

the man beside me speaks and my brother arches his head up in atlantean effort,

resisting the magnet call of the earth for one second. not for me, but for the stranger.

I hadn't noticed his eyes had turned pale, like their characteristic gravity had sunk down

through his fingertips, and he was fighting to recover it.

he wasn't. my brother isn't fighting anything except distance, and even that is beneath him.

I wonder if this should radicalize me. but his pale eyes match the morning sky

and I cannot bring myself to move towards or away.

I simply follow the man down the road skirting the garbage dump into the city and

I make no decision.

I live to see another horror.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it is a common misconception that Atlas holds the earth on his shoulders, when in fact his punishment was to hold up the celestial spheres.  
> He has always held the sky at bay.
> 
> couldn't find much on Saint Agnes except that she is usually depicted with a palm branch, symbolizing triumph of the faithful.


	4. culpability

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one more thing: [post](https://laymanterms.tumblr.com/post/619627564931104768/4culpability-its-face-was-wide-and-white-and)

The dictaphone lies on the table between the two men.

The man in the bed watches the journalist. He does not respond to the questions about his wife, his daughters. He does not begin to speak until David Ward tells him a story.

It’s a trick David Ward has learned from old detective shows he used to watch on TV – offer a morsel of yourself, and you may be granted a feast.

He was young then. In Eskew, he has learned that the hand that feeds gets taken or bitten. But he needs this story.

What does he tell him about?

A. His childhood friend?

B. His dog?

C. His mother?

D. Everything?

* * *

A. The girl.

David Ward tells the man in the hospital bed that he sympathises with him. He also had a less-than-ideal childhood. The children at school didn’t like me, he says. They taped over my locker a lot. But I could always count on my best friend to come by with scissors and help me out. Her jokes still make me laugh, he says, whenever I remember them.

The man in the bed is silent and very still.

Then he begins to speak.

He describes the forest behind his primary school.

It was a dark forest. The pine trees huddled close together and whispered whenever there was wind enough. They stood just clear of the chain-link fence that separated the school grounds, their arms never quite reaching over it.

To him, it seemed dense, secretive. To his best friend, it was adventure.

His best friend was the most important person in his life besides his father. So, the most important person by choice. She was always so active that being around her made him feel like he could act, too.

But, when she finally cut a hole in the fence using some clippers she found in her garage, his legs shook so bad that he couldn’t follow her or hold her back. He just stood, some metres away from the hole in the fence, as she told him she’d be back quickly, and disappeared into the pine needles.

And she did come back quickly, her eyes shining from new possibilities. She bent the chain back into place and skipped alongside him as they returned from recess to learn more about geometry.

She kept going into the woods alone. He could never talk himself into walking into that new territory. He always waited for her, watching the gap. Always willing her to return safe.

And she kept doing so. Until the last year they were to be in that school.

The autumn wind blew right through his sweater as he waited for his best friend to emerge from the pines. It whispered through the trees and they leaned over the fence towards him, leering down at him from behind the chain-link fence.

He jumped to his feet when he saw a pale shape solidify in between the trunks. He ran over to the fence and peeled back the cut-away portion like he always did. Only, the thing that stepped up to it wasn’t who he had been waiting for.

The thing that was not his friend was wearing his friend’s clothes, and it had its friend’s face. It was clutching it in a long-fingered hand. On its own head was a head of white, chalky skin stretched way too far to the sides. It grinned at him in a way that reminded him of his friend, but only in the way that her grin was always about the unknown, about adventure.

He froze at the fence, already having peeled it away. His friend’s face flapped slightly in the wind.

It stood still in the woods. It simply looked at him, as if waiting for him to remember that he wanted to step through the hole. Had always wanted to. It took half a step back as if to clear room for him.

He backed away. His hands were claws around the links and the fence was pulled closed as he staggered away, finally releasing the metal. He ran to the school, shallow breaths matching the gusting wind, and when he looked over his shoulder to see if he was being followed, only a shiver along the treeline greeted him.

It was only decades later, with his father safely put to rest on Cemetery Hill, when he was living out in the grey suburbs with a wife who loved him and two daughters who he’d do anything for, caught in the trap of middle-aged comfort and that he began to wonder, once again…

...what would have happened to him, if he’d gone with her?

And he begins to ache with regret and shame that he did not have the courage to reach out and take the hand of the thing that was not his closest friend and go with her to whatever journey was being offered to him.

His eyes fall. His fingers clench into fists.

That was my next mistake, he says. And I have made so many dreadful mistakes.

He remembers one particular walk home. He had stayed late, so the sky was dark, and the wind that blew against his coat was cold. He walked, loathing the journey home to his kind and caring family, the inevitable conclusion of a life that had begun with horror and achieved only the banal success of making itself ordinary, when he heard the shaking of a chain-link fence.

He paused, listening. The wind picked up and died down, ruffling the cedar bushes that stretched alongside the pavement he was walking on. The houses on the other side of them cast dim light between the gaps of the bushes, and the streetlamps barely illuminated the street.

He had walked this road so many times, and he had never paid attention to the other side of the street.

It was in shadow. A park, he thought, as he looked at the pine trees past the fence. The wind gusted again, and he saw what had been making the noise. A cut-away section of the fence clanged, bent in the wind. Something just barely lighter than the dark of the night was behind it, a few metres away. He squinted at it.

He must have crossed the street to see it more clearly as he jumped when his hand touched cold, thin metal. The pale thing was still there, still as small as a child. He knew what it must be. The old fear reared its head and he drew his hand back from the fence. The trees whispered behind him as he retreated once again.

It was only when he rounded his own cedar bush onto his driveway that he stopped thinking about the fence. He stopped thinking about anything at all, because at once he could see that his front door was wide open and the light within was shining brightly over an empty hallway.

He stepped into his house, calling his wife’s name as he walked into the deserted kitchen.

Calling his daughter’s names as he walked into the living room, and saw the open patio door, leading out into their little garden. Saw the pines lining the backyard.

Stopped calling.

Saw the clothesline, bedsheets and socks hanging in the darkness, billowing like phantoms in the wind.

His wife’s face. His daughters’ faces, pegged and eyeless and empty, hung there amongst the washing.

Try again?

* * *

B. The dog.

David Ward tells the man in the hospital bed about his dog. He has only ever had one dog, when he was a child. No reason not to get another one, he says. He just… hasn’t. The memories still last him enough, though. The well-worn memories play so vividly, he can almost see the dark coat of the puppy shining in the hospital lighting, ears bouncing as it pounces on a rubber ball.

The man in the bed is silent and very still.

Then he begins to speak.

He describes his anger.

The man on the bed doesn’t want to dwell on the past, on the years when he was living with his father. Despite this, he still describes beer cans hurled at the wall, kicks aimed at his ribs. Insults that he was forced to repeat over and over, agreeing with them.

You can imagine, he says, that this would lead to a very angry young man.

As the years passed, his father became more and more creative with his abuse, and the boy became more and more creative in his excuses to not be in the same room as him.

He kept to himself, slinging stones down into the various gulleys around the city. Burning junk he found. Kicking at concrete walls. When he went to school he would inevitably start one fight or another and get sent home.

It was after one such day, when he was just starting to walk the dreaded alleys back to his house, that he heard a voice call after him. It was one of the older boys in the school, a mean kid whom he had only avoided by chance so far. He caught up with him.

He said he never liked the kid currently nursing a black eye in the nurse’s office. The two fell into step, and the older boy asked him where he was going. At his answer of nowhere, the older boy grinned and said that he had something to show him. The two set off down alleyways, laughing at one another’s jokes. It turned out they got on well enough.

The older one stopped in front of a crate. Look inside, he said.

Inside was a squealing puppy. The boy looked, confused, back at him.

This one’ll be a lot of fun, he reassured him. He’s loud.

Casting his gaze around, the boy saw rope and wire and sticks. He had an inkling as to what the other boy had meant. He hung around for a bit longer then excused himself and returned home early, quickly ducking into his room to avoid another beer can.

They once again met in the alleyways behind the school. This time the boy was sporting a black eye, not gained from a classmate. Rage pulsed underneath his fingers, twitching them, stretching them, and the older boy nodded. The two set off.

The dog was bigger. It yelped when he kicked its crate. The other boy set off to find a nicely sized rock. He waited at the crate, gazing down at the animal, willing it to take the shape of his father’s face. His hands shook.

A slight noise came from the alley the boy had disappeared down. He turned around, expecting to see his worn black sneakers stepping into the square. Which he did, however faintly, against the gloom of the alley. But the thing that sat on top of the sneakers was not who he had come here with.

It was wearing his clothes and it had his face too, only it was clutched in its hand. With its other hand it offered a rock to him. It grinned with its unmoving mouth and it offered the rock. The grin was the closest thing to right about it – it was the grin of something becoming dangerous.

The boy’s anger had not dissipated with his fear. Instead the two had melded, clashing within his chest. He looked at the rock, and looked at the thing’s chalky face, and thought about the dog behind him because he did not dare to turn around.

The fear won. He backed away. His foot hit the crate and the dog yelped again and this finally jarred him into action, a dead sprint away from the thing that was not a friend and away from the thing that was not dead.

It was only decades later, with his father put to rest on Cemetery Hill, when he was living out in the grey suburbs with a wife who loved him and two daughters who he’d do anything for, caught in the trap of middle-aged comfort and that he began to wonder, once again…

...what would have happened to him, if he’d taken the rock?

And he begins to ache with regret and anger that he did not have the courage to reach out and take the hand of the thing that was not a potential friend and follow through with whatever action was being offered to him.

His eyes fall. His fingers clench into fists.

That was my next mistake, he says. And I have made so many dreadful mistakes.

He remembers one particular walk home. He had to stay late so the day had turned to gloom around him. He walked the familiar alleys, loathing the journey home to his kind and caring family, the inevitable conclusion of a life that had begun with horror and achieved only the banal success of making itself ordinary, when he heard croaking yowl of an old dog.

It continued for many blocks. The mongrel was following him home, limping, stopping then managing to catch up again. It was old, and it was loud.

A familiar anger reared its head underneath his ribs. He wasn’t allowed one second of peace, one second of nobody on his back.

He spun around to yell at the dog, to kick something at it – and movement from the alleyway next to him caught his eye. A fist-sized rock rolled out of it, stopping at his feet.

He stared at it in disbelief, then looked back at the dog. It had stopped, collapsed, even, some metres away. Its bony ribs rose and fell arrhythmically. He did not look, but he was sure that the thing that was not a boy waited in the alley. The dog gasped out wheezing breaths.

He turned and ran again.

It was only when he finally reached his back street that he stopped running. He could see the porch light shining brightly ahead of him, light spilling out of the open patio door.

He stepped into his backyard, calling his wife’s name. He could see the kitchen was empty.

Calling his daughter’s names as he pushed through the laundry that was still drying there.

Somewhere, a dog howled, long and loud. He stopped calling.

Something wet, almost warm, finally landed in his hand.

His wife’s face.

He raised his own to see his daughters’ faces, pegged and eyeless and empty, hung there amongst the washing.

Try again?

* * *

C. The mother.

David Ward tells the man in the hospital bed about his mother. About the tuneless melody she would sing as she ran the bath for him. The hot towel that waited for him when he stepped out of the water.

The man in the bed is silent and very still.

Then he begins to speak.

David Ward is unsettled by how easily the man starts to talk about his mother. Like his period of silence had been a listening. Like he had accumulated words and they had just now reached his mouth. The only thing that still moves beneath the white gauze.

He tells him about his prayers, about his father, and about the thing that was not his mother. How he had chosen to be ordinary, as he sees it.

How he had come home to his family that night.

How he regrets it so hard he can hear his bones splinter.

It is not clear what he means by ‘it’.

Try again?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cowardice, rage, longing. Give me a childhood that doesn’t have those three in that order.
> 
> At first I thought that David would begin to speak about his mother and would not stop. He would tell the faceless, nameless man in the hospital bed everything. Relinquish all memories.  
> But then probably the story would be over, only 4 episodes in.  
> So I scrapped option D. Everything else.


	5. illumination

I’ve tried to write these words so many times.

This is a lie, but it has its hooks in me. It needs a strong opening sentence.

I am pressing play again.

I knew there would be an episode I cannot discuss. Cannot write for. I am berating myself that it comes so early in the series. The fifth episode.

I thought I was stronger. I thought I had gotten better.

Have I told you I started this project because I knew I would abandon this narrative the second I realized I could not bear it? Have I told you that I am writing these words, episode by episode, to throw some challenge, some obstacle to the overwhelming need to run?

To complete, or to escape. The two words are always exclusionary.

To be clear, I am talking about escaping the words on my screen. The transcript. Which seems so derisory, so pathetic to say out loud. So I won’t say out it out loud. I will type these words on my screen and I will hope no one will say them out loud.

Hope.

I have nothing to say about hope.

It takes me an entire day to listen to the 29 minutes and 29 seconds I am presented with. I make it exactly 14 minutes into the words before I shut my laptop and exit the walls to my garden. Just to feel the earth beneath my fingers. Just to ground myself, reassure myself I am not standing, once again, on the precipice, the red bricks of the old railway bridge.

I am sure I shut the laptop.

But when I come back, hours later, the screen is still lit, still open, still hot to the touch. My face lights up with what I am sure is the light of an oncoming train.

It seems I have no choice in the matter.

I steel myself and I press play again.

I sit in a psychiatrist’s office and I stare at the corner. My own corner is empty, has always stayed empty, but it gives me an excuse to avoid her eyes. I know where the pale thing is, and I keep my mouth shut. Its scratchings wear away my teeth, but I refuse to open my mouth for it.

I have already done wrong. When I am not looking at the corner I can only look at the dark splotches of discoloured carpet which follow my path and pool at my feet. I have already tracked my sickness to her chair. I don’t want her to fall ill. I am sure that if I answer her questions, the pale thing will unfold itself from my tongue and settle behind her eyes, and it will begin, for her; again, for me.

I do not want to proliferate this sickness, but it oozes from my pores. It’s all I can do not to speak. She seems like a nice woman, and I don’t want her to 

**Jump!**

  


Sometimes I can’t stop myself. I cannot hold back the words it scratches on the sandpaper of my throat. Whatever it is, it wants to be seen, wants to be seen specifically by others it deems important or worthy or enough. That is not me, and it scratches at me, so I press play again. The diseased words squirm onto the page from underneath my nails, alive and evil, almost, jettisoning from the unavoidable fiery death of the craft I’m listening to, a shattered vessel I’m handed and told to fill –

I don’t know if you can hear me.

I almost don’t want you to. Because if you can, you might be important. Because if you can, it might want you.

I know I can only take on shapes, and mimic, and read the transcripts. And here is where it differs.

I hear the word react, but distort swims on the page before me.

Twin voices whisper from underneath the bridge. You can only distort. You can only react.

Through the frosted glass of my vision, the two words merge into one dark shape. And it bears down on me like an oncoming train or the ground. I know which one is correct. Unable to create an escape, I watch it approach.

I am on the old railway bridge, and I thought I was doing much better.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I woke up the morning after writing this having just been scuttering and many-legged.  
> My window was open, and my throat hurts still.  
> For what it's worth, I'm sorry.


	6. intrusion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a series of disconnected images? [cracks knuckles]  
> time to rant abt things that only make sense to me

> “Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”

Has everyone read it? It’s a good quote, isn’t it? Mark Danielewski wrote this in his novel House of Leaves. I think each of us can relate to this, the hunting and killing of time.

But have you ever killed yourself?

**[pause]**

No, not in the standard way, of course, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.

**[pause for laughter]**

But have you ever bore down on your own self, trying to exist smaller and smaller, trying to trap yourself within the small life you lead? Not going here, not going there, not responding until you fit exactly within your skin; the world outside your path, even your room completely devoid of you? If you have, it’s likely for the same reasons:

  1. Giving up,
  2. Not caring,
  3. A resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish.



And my question, and indeed the topic I would like to discuss with you today, is – what is ‘past’? Yes, the third point – what does it mean for us to ‘get past it all’?

Well, if you’ve ever trapped yourself as thoroughly as I’ve described, you almost certainly know the answer. But, if you are in this room, chances are you haven’t. Let me explain.

I posit there is no ‘after’. Because time goes on, and we all know nothing changes. Everything comes back in cycles. And anyone who has killed themselves, in the manner described above, is still there.

Routine.

Routine is something done every day, consistently, and it continues with time, and, as you know, time continues on its own.

I am, of course, talking about ghosts.

Those who have drawn inward so much that they are nothing but a record, spinning loose, scratching at all the same places.

A mother, unnoticed, unseen except for her hands which, disembodied, set the table and serve the Tuesday night casserole. A janitor who knows exactly where he steps night after night. A student, unspeaking, sitting at one desk, then going home to sit at another. The same.

There is no ‘after’, because it never stops.

They become fixtures, features in the landscape which all eyes slide off after the first glance. And they stay there. Year after year after year. They repeat. And they will keep repeating.

From the outside perspective, it may seem like a pitiable life. This is simply ridiculous. Do we pity the wheel, cyclical, repeating its motions underneath us, carrying us? No, of course not. And to thank it would be similarly absurd. The wheel merely exists, kept in its tracks. And so do the ghosts.

Unlike the wheel, however, those tracks may be long and complex. That is why some of us – yes, I know you do – fear ghosts. To us, they are unpredictable, appearing to scare us, then disappearing once again. We may look at their hauntings as we would dark water – still and unfathomable until a fin, a hand, a bloated face breaks the surface. But you need only remember that they are just following their path. Do not be afraid.

**[pause]**

But it’s not so easy, is it.

Because sometimes they look back.

Sometimes they regret chaining themselves to their actions, for whatever reason they did it first – sometimes the ghost sees you, sees you living and swelling within the world, and it feels its own small life shivering in its skin, now a mimic. And sometimes they’ll reach for you.

Rest assured that most of them do not have murder in their routine. If they do, you very likely had already heard of them, and are seeking them out specifically. But most of them do not.

So, what can they do?

Cycles. They do what they always do.

They walk their paths and, like water circling the drain, like a marble moving ever closer to the point of lowest energy, like an accretion disk, you’ll be drawn along. Momentum. And isn’t that an act of killing? To force you into a path not your own, for you to walk alien passages, until you see the light at the end of the tunnel?

But the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t death, it isn’t something different at all, it isn’t ‘after’. Remember – cycles! It is the same terrible light that hit your face as you left that building and those no longer inside it, all those years ago! It is the same light that pierced the collapsing mineshaft of your chest, illuminating ruin, until you were nothing but a phantom of pain yourself!

Repetition! You cannot do anything new. You cannot allow yourself to swell, like an engine cannot allow itself to swell - your heart must remain, iron, inflexible, within your chest, just as you must remain within your skin and only your skin. To venture out of routine is to violate heaven itself!

Cycles!

Do not venture out. If you remain within, you have a chance – not at life, not anymore, but still a chance! Its mouth is infinite, but if you shrink to a teaspoon, it may pass you by – if you make yourself a meal not worth having, it may not eat you! You must make yourself so small, it won’t notice your life!

Trap yourself, before it can do the same!

You must get past it!

**[pause]**

Oh god.

Why are you clapping?

Why are you clapping?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also related:  
> “Suicidal feelings are not the same as giving up on life. Suicidal feelings often express a powerful and overwhelming need for a different life. Suicidal feelings can mean, in a desperate and unyielding way, a demand for something new. Listen to someone who is suicidal and you often hear a need for change so important, so indispensable, that they would rather die than go on living without the change." -Will Hall  
> something about permanently 'living' without change, or dying for it
> 
> anyways adults with primitive wire-and-cloth alarm contraptions at their bedroom doors solidarity


	7. edibility

Sam sways with the movement of the subway car, not thinking of anything. Simply staring at the dark tunnel walls roaring by. And even though the carriage is lit and the tunnel is pitch black, there is no reflection in the window. The architecture doesn't permit her herself.

She exits the subway, avoiding the weird turnstile, and ascends the steps to the rain above. She doesn’t look at the homeless man whose mutterings she can hear but refuses to listen to, and sets off down the street. Second left, first left, first left. If ever she had tried to rationalize the obvious spiral away, she has given up on doing so. All she cares about is making it to the door before the garbage truck makes its way up the street. To not answer the door when the garbagemen knock.

She opens the home décor store with the ornate key given to her by her predecessor, and punches in the alarm code, disabling its unchanging silence.

The day is like any other day – it passes.

It is close to closing time when Sam looks up from the box of picture frames she’s unpacking. She hadn’t heard her phone, locked up in the employee lounge as it is, but she knows she had gotten a text.

It feels like the city had shifted.

She enables the useless alarm and locks the shop door. After that, it’s a sprint to the subway. She doesn’t see the lampposts-like-fingers today, but she still runs. The small and familiar fear sharpens her mind, just a little, as it does every day, so when she looks at the homeless man sitting in the same alley he doubles under his vision. She looks away quickly.

Her usual seat on the subway is occupied by… She glances away, anchoring her drifting gaze on her phone. The subway lurches towards the suburbs as she checks her messages.

The text starts with the usual pleasantry, the usual “I haven’t seen you in a while,” and the usual “Let’s catch up!” It ends with an address, one that links to a seafood restaurant near the fish market. Sam sends back a reply saying that yes, she’ll be there, as she walks to her front door.

Her husband is nowhere to be seen, but that isn’t unusual. Sometimes she’ll spend her entire evening at home, cooking dinner and eating alone, watching the muted colours on the TV, before a sound causes her to turn her head and discover his unmoving form beside her on the couch, one arm draped around her shoulders.

So she isn’t concerned, only shrugging off her jacket and unbuttoning her blouse and stepping into her lounging sweatpants. She notices that they’re starting to fray, against the backdrop of a carpet that is also starting to fray. She frowns, and brings her hand up, staring at it, and clenches it. She feels more present. A dawning suspicion whittles at her, and she glances at her phone.

It has always been like asking for the weather. Sure, she could text her friend and find out – just as easy as looking at the pre-installed weather app on her phone – or she could just look outside. Sam looks out the window, and knows that David will be joining them tomorrow.

On her way to work the next day, the homeless man in the shadows looks at her. No malice or interest in his eyes, but the glint out of the darkness gives his gaze away. He never looks at her.

She had almost used the turnstile that opens out into that different corridor.

The garbageman gives the door an extra knock.

It feels like her routine has thinned. Like something is pressing down around her.

The rain wets the entrance to the subway that evening so it looks like a salivating mouth waiting to swallow her.

She breathes heavily from her run, hesitating on the bumpy tongue of the steps. Head as clear as it ever gets under the leftovers of adrenaline, she looks down into it. She remembers she is scared of Eskew.

She also remembers that she doesn’t ever do anything about it.

Her nice shirt is getting wet under the rain.

She descends the steps.

Sam becomes aware of her surroundings like a stabbing – suddenly. Except the rift chasing away her fog is sitting next to her, staring at the basket of prawn tempura in front of him.

She had been, apparently, talking about the business this week, how the mirrors were selling quickly. She trails off, and the conversation resumes around her. She turns to David and tries to engage him, feeling a little guilty.

“How are the recordings going?”

He looks at her blankly. “What recordings?”

She smiles. He’s always so secretive. “You know, about your daily life?”

His eyes grow distant. “Life?” he asks, bitterly. “Would you call this life?”

He doesn’t want an answer, so she just laughs fondly and turns away from him. He seems to be all in order.

The conversation had moved on, and Dennis is talking about the raise he had gotten at work. On her other side, David slowly reaches for the tempura shrimp. He selects one and examines it at length before biting into it. He must have liked it, because he sets about working through the pile of tempura. She doesn’t scold him, knowing that he’ll settle into his usual routine of scowling at the food they order. He might as well eat something now.

Time passes, as always, in clumps. The next time Sam is present, Carmel is asking David about his job.

“I was fired,” comes his short response, drawing into his coat.

Carmel chases him, leans forward in concern. “Oh no! I’m so sorry to hear that! Are you looking for anything else?”

David’s lips turn down in contempt and he glares down the street. “There’s hardly a use in looking. It’ll throw its worms at me, and I’ll bite at whatever it offers. No matter what I do.”

Carmel shoots Sam a look and turns back to the rest of the group. Sam is still turned to David, trying to find a response, when he stiffens and sits up. She follows his gaze and the pity in her eyes is replaced by the image of the man. He’s striding straight for their table, unwavering. She nudges Dennis and nods towards him.

“Oh, shit,” he mutters. “There’s some crazy guy heading straight for us.”

They all look away, pretending to be lost in conversation. David keeps staring at the man.

They jump when he slams his hands down on the table and speaks, quickly but deliberately, to David. Sam, practiced at not listening, refuses to understand his words, spoken not a metre away from her ear. The man is shooed away by the waiter, who later apologetically slides them another round of beer with their meal.

“Have a nice night!”

She waves at the retreating group. The colours are vivid around her. She pauses to look around in wonder. The sunset is violet, peeking through the tall buildings and cradling her friends’ disappearing silhouettes. The neon signs mingle with it to reflect in the glass eyes of the shopfronts.

A suspicion whittles at her. She looks around, concentrating now.

She doesn’t see David.

Something sinks in her gut.

She knows he won’t be joining them again just as clearly as she can see the night sky.

She walks away from the restaurant. Then she jogs. Then she runs, clarity wavering in her skull, her eyes catching on the city like rough hands on wool, tearing strands loose – that woman has no head. Something vibrant and slow trickling from a third-storey window. A large collection of masks in the gutter. An abundance of misshapen cloaks.

A useless alarm, an explosion of colour - endorphins in a dying brain. She’s not coming back from this.

Except space resolves itself around her once more. She is unlocking her front door with shaking hands. She’s wearing her nice shirt, and panic is still squeezing at her mind, so it may even be the same evening. And she grows frantic as the world around her flickers into grey again, a radio losing signal before dissolving into static forever.

Before the flash of clarity clears, she rushes to her bathroom and retrieves the razor. She tries to write out the words, write out what she needs to remember, before she’s discarded –

The woman steps out of her bathroom, confusedly looking back at the blood in the sink. She gingerly dabs at the gouges on her hand as she walks to the living room.

“Honey! Honey, do you remember what I was doing an hour ago?”

The man on the couch looks at her blankly. “Hm? No, I don’t.” He turns back to the TV.

She returns to the bathroom as her hand is still bleeding profusely. She runs it under cold water, trying to shake off some unknown residual panic. In the grey light the wounds resolve themselves into letters.

E.

S.

C.

She regards them with an absence of any emotion whatsoever. She wonders if they’re meant to spell out the name of the city she lives in.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> imagine being friends with this guy... "hey david, how are you?"  
> "death is unavoidable. suffering more so."  
> "okay!"
> 
> anyways this is a light one so I can ramble a bit about the show. I totally did not expect the subjects of the first 4 eps to come back with a vengeance, and defs didn’t expect another narrator! so safe to say I have no idea where this show is heading and I am PUMPED  
> although if a plot kicks in it’ll get really hard to keep writing episode-by-episode
> 
> i usually loop one song when i write, & this time it happens to be very relevant: Ill At Ease by Those Poor Bastards


	8. motivation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> speak of the devil - there's the plot. i didnt actually have anything to say about this ep. so this one's a short poem, emphasis on the letter 'o', like the tunnels.

оказывается что моли не едят. и роль открывается как рот как туннель ест через окружающих

это не моль которая ест — это ее дети. черви. и вина падает на род. и дети съедают родителей.

сколько много молей надо чтобы окружить огонь, лампу, чтобы свет стал совсем не доступным через червей?

черви которые окружают свет как одеяло, густое от множества тел, не шёлк а отвратительная плоть.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also? грабить but also like, grub-eat. light probably
> 
> this is me acknowledging that implying this passes for 'fanfiction' is a little insulting. yes i Know this show deserves way better content, but its apparently not gonna come from me so. just send me anon hate or smthn if you have to lmao cheers


	9. respite

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FUCK that intro. scared the shit out of me

He is hurt. He is confused. He has swallowed the worm and the hook embedded in his stomach is bleeding and he should heal.

He should go to the hospital.

He ran from his friends, friends I have assigned him, given him. I will bind his arms and bind him to the burn ward. No more running.

He will stay and see.

He will heal.

He discusses the things he left behind when he moved into me with the ward. A necessary lull before the break.

He will not look back after this.

He will want to rejoin me after this.

He has swallowed the worm and the hook is embedded. Let the line out to reel the fish in easier.

He is warm and comfortable and I can see he balks at the idea of remaining.

He no longer feels comfortable. Illusion dismantled by the unbound hands of the Graft. False dichotomy of healed and un. Bartholomew and Eskew.

He does not want to join it. Not him. Isolation and connection. Again he turns away.

He does not unheal. Doesn’t touch the warning on the back of his hand. Leaves it to fade. It starts to appear on me instead.

He runs towards me. Teeth tearing at the white gauze like white worm flesh, the fish is dragged onto the pavement.

He is running and laughing and feeling his city on his skin. With me again.

But

He is not special, just a man who runs away. I have many others like him, who behave erratically and evade me until they can no longer. He is not special.

But

He unwrapped his legs last. A man who runs unwrapped his legs last. Did you want to stay, David? Did you want to stay away? False dichotomy and a system that produces different results when given the same input. You’ll entertain me yet.

You won't stay away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did anyone solve that crossword clue? I would love to know the answer
> 
> historical footnote: the author took a month-long break to write smthn original, found at [tentative-explanation](https://tentative-explanation.tumblr.com/)


	10. performance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i was actually JUST thinking abt slasher movies as an attack on the suburban American Dream (white picket fence etc) yesterday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'll be the first to get pissed off when people compare every podcast to each other but i am allowed one (1) comparison piece. i've been saving it. behold my 8th grade writing skills

Things I Find Scary: A Surface-Level Analysis of Three Episodes

by yours truly

Written or narrated works rarely receive a physical reaction from the reader or listener. Both mediums are very removed from the usual culprits behind such reactions: jumpscares and disturbing images. So in the rare case when a narrated story achieves a recoil of fear or revulsion from the listener, it is always interesting to examine the cause of the response. In this essay, three works were chosen based on the author’s personal experience: Go Home Again from Alice Isn’t Dead, Tucked In from The Magnus Archives, and Performance from I Am In Eskew. Additionally, general statements and examples will be drawn from classic home invasion and slasher films such as Halloween.

The home represents shelter and identity. It is a place to heal and hide from danger; it is a feeling of security made physical and given a location. When the trauma occurs at home, the person is left without security or shelter. They are left unmoored. As shelter is a basic need, an attack on the home can be likened to an attack on the body.

Even as an attack on the home is an attack on the body, it is an attack on the mind. The home is imprinted on the occupant’s consciousness just by virtue of spending many hours there. Its significance is emphasized in the cases of childhood homes, as the environment plays a significant role in one’s development. Therefore, an attack on the walls of a house is an attack on the walls of the mind that grew up there, ingrained as the architecture is in memories and, therefore, in behaviour.

However, associations with one’s home will change as time passes. As an adult, the home is transformed by the means needed to get it. It becomes a symbol of accomplishment which the adult has found and purchased themselves. The adult then owns the space, crosses the threshold and inhabits it alone. They are master of their domain. So it is all the more unsettling when something enters uninvited. When something begins to exist in the space despite the owner’s wishes. The antagonist exercises power over the situation, power over the home and, unmistakeably, power over the owner, when they cross the threshold.

With this power comes competition. The antagonistic force could be seen as a rival in the competitive economy and the American Dream, trying to take the owner’s place in their house, occupying it until their roles are reversed and the owner becomes the outsider. The accomplishment of earning a house is taken from them and they are cursed to exist outside the house, to look into a foreign life occupied by something just a bit better than they are. So in addition to being an attack on the body and mind, a home invasion also serves as an attack on societal standing – on worth.

Before replacement can happen, the house must serve as a backdrop for conflict. When trapped in a house with something dangerous, the familiar architecture becomes antagonistic. A failure to change when it needs to, the hallway too narrow to get past the killer, the open plan living room failing to conceal the horror that stands there. The walls, once sheltering, now become the rigid, unmerciful setting of the owner’s demise. They stubbornly refuse to impede the evil or hide the protagonist from it. Their death will be another event the walls witness.

In Go Home Again, the apartment does exactly that. When the character attempts to return to a regular life, she is denied that standing both by the antagonist and the home. Her apartment remains stubborn and static while the evil force terrorizes her within the walls. The evil does not manipulate the house – in fact, the audience is not allowed to know how the evil gains entrance or exit, and is at times described as incorporeal, existing as footsteps or a voice. It is more of an invisible and malevolent feeling, rather than a physical presence. The sense of something within the apartment, and the knowledge that it may inflict harm at any moment, is enough to instill dread within the character and the listener.

The same holds true in Tucked In. For most of the story, the physical presence of the evil is not felt. It does not interact with the home. But the environment changes regardless. As the story progresses, the character’s fear causes the world to narrow. His world shrinks to the confines of his house, then to his bedroom, until he is too afraid to go anywhere but beneath his blanket. While the evil itself does not change his home, the environment is still altered as he attempts to not share his space with the entity. These changes already instill a sense of wrongness, but the horror reaches its peak when the intruder subverts the rules it had set up for itself and enters his space without warning. In doing so it reveals that it had some control over the character’s environment, and therefore had some control over the character all along.

This subversion is also present in Performance. Before Performance, the evil was introduced in Culpability. Culpability was a comforting episode precisely because the antagonist’s rules were clear and even familiar. The figure at the door was not threatening. It followed the etiquette expected of humans. When it knocked, it presented an ordinary choice: to open or not to open the door. It, like any polite would-be guest, tactfully retreated at the silence on the other side – the silence the resident is entitled to.

Performance is jarring in every single aspect. The physicality of the antagonists is established early on, within the context of their performance – a dance the characters are forced to take part in. When the threat pushes the characters into their home, they lock the door, expecting the rules to hold and the door to keep the evil at bay. Instead, the home is infiltrated by danger right before the characters’ eyes, unhurriedly and clearly. But in this instance, the evil changes the very walls around them. This is complete power, the ultimate threat – if the evil can alter the walls around the body, then it stands to reason that the evil can alter anything and everything about the body, about the situation. The threat becomes so vast that the characters become numb, become deer in the headlights – they have no choice but to stand in the middle of the road and wait for whatever happens next. They surrender to complete powerlessness.

From these works, three important criteria for a home invasion emerge. First, the ability of an evil force to cross the threshold, achieving the same power as the owner in one fell step. Second, the presence of it inside the house. Whether it poses a danger to the body, a danger to the mind, or a danger to the character’s standing, it is obvious that the evil is able and willing to do irreversible harm. And lastly, the force’s ability to manipulate the surroundings. If it is capable of doing so, it proves that it is superior to the owner who has been, thus far, the master of the house. If the evil can invade the home, create a palpable threat, and finally manipulate the environment, it can be considered the ultimate invasion, and have ultimate power.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fave episode!!! fave episode.  
> halfway thru writing this i realized that this was the dumbest thing ive written. and i had so much fun. im off to read horror analyses now  
> if i were to spend more than a day on this i would research when the american slasher film originated and compare that to american ideals at the time. bc i feel like home invasion movies hit their stride recently? like 2000s/2010s hooray for materialism  
> and i also have things to say abt 'attack on home==attack on body' and body horror, as in the last stage of invading the home is to invade the body, as the body/home is where you live, as extension, as in Tucked In the last narrowing of the world was the protagonist's skin, as in Performance the intruders had Literally taken the protagonists' faces,


	11. product

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> took me an embarrassingly long time to realize what "they're all in here with me" meant

Found near the back of the annual report, associated with a discontinued and insignificant project - a list titled Contributors. No last names are listed.

Contributors:

Malcolm

Lucille

Cynthia

Bethany

Roger

Claudio

Peter

Grace

Thomas

Dana

Victor

Timothy

Marvin

Aisha

Andreja

Mahdi

Simon

Clarissa

Sasha

Emily

Fernando

Nicholas

Anisha

Rahul

Samantha

Rose

Asaf

Pravin

Morgan

Ksenya

Katrina

Evan

~~David~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> discontinuing this series sorry. sucks that i didn't even get halfway


	12. alliance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't like him.

Trapped in the architecture even after exiting the building.

Mind shaped and scarred around the walls and doors that he has spent so long studying, the professor cannot even imagine not inhabiting Eskew.

Good, Riyo thinks. Here is a man that should be haunted by his past. If his past doesn’t do it, if his conscience is lacking, he should be haunted by something else.

The architecture will do.


	13. embroidery

If you repeat something enough, it will eventually permeate your life.

Kenneth repeated his day so much that it came to life and enacted its desires upon him, instead of the other way around.

Wake up. Stretch his shirt in one awkward spot or another. Brush his teeth, pack a lunch, bus to work. Avoid that one street with that one window. Sit down at his desk. Work idly – snack break at 10, lunch at 12, stand in line at the copy machine at 3. Pack up at 5, sit on a park bench for 2 hours, wait until everyone is gone. Then dig until his arms are too sore to dig any longer.

Kenneth doesn’t move on from this job because this is the only way he can survive. Kenneth only survives because he isn’t discovered. Kenneth doesn't survive because he slipped up in his routine.

Kenneth gets a family because he made every pretense of wanting one. Kenneth starts a family like any other man - by wanting one.

His family is there for him at his darkest point, just as families are supposed to be.

In the darkness of the tunnel he is embraced by his wife, his children.

He repeats the word because it has permeated him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i simply don't hate anyone enough to write what i was planning on, its hard to imagine  
> other people in general are hard to imagine right now
> 
> also interesting to note that REM appeared on the city and the family appeared for kenneth. influence is a two-way street baby


	14. woe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> apologies for uploading the recent chapters out of order. still cant write product

The sky is empty. Not of clouds, though those are absent too, but of sun and foliage and colour. It is empty of anything which would identify it as a sky, to the point that it feels like you’re standing beneath a blank slate.

It is blank in a way that makes it clear that there is nothing for you here. And yet you venture forwards, into it, away from the train.

The waystation is grey.

You didn’t know wood could be this grey. Back where you lived, wood was dark brown and golden and shining in the sun. You ran among the trees and you were golden with them. And this waystation is to those trees what you are to that little girl – diluted and delusional that they have any connection to this place.

No connection, perhaps, besides what you have made. Of yourself, and of the places you’ve traveled to – the sick feeling of recognition warped, like this city is like any other city, if you chipped away at the facades and fountains enough.

Like that little girl – like you’ve been like this all your life, and are only now chipped away enough to notice it.

The reflection in the vending machine wavers around the greasy glass and you turn away quickly. You weren’t hungry anyway.

In this act of turning away from yourself, you see the man.

In the act of walking towards him you see nothing recognizable.

He is at the very end of the platform, so you have time to wonder why you are making your way toward him. You are not good with people, never have been; you have never sought out strange company. Maybe you just want a different face, not one of your friends’. Maybe you want to discern the reasons why a man would be holding an umbrella in the middle of nowhere under an empty sky.

Maybe you just wanted to go for a walk.

It turns out to be inconsequential as the man ignores you thoroughly. It turns out to be the most important decision of your life.

His grin doesn’t falter in the way that cliffs don’t falter, cut into his face naturally. In fact, you’ve started likening him to a feature in the grey landscape, unmoving and inanimate. The uneasy curiosity that settled over you upon finding a lone man at a waystation has washed away into a grudging admission that you will not get a response from him. You turn and stalk away, muttering under your breath, “It isn’t even raining, stupid.”

“It’s raining where I am.”

Such an inane response should not mean anything to anyone. Such a sentence, delivered in such a way, should split apart clouds and shine a ray of heavenly light directly on your face. But there are no clouds and there is no sun so instead you are doused in dread.

“It’s raining where I am. Soon it’ll be raining where you are, too.”

His mouth doesn’t move with the words. He has turned towards you and your eyes are too different to meet.

This feature of the landscape looks at you and means you harm.

The black umbrella floats against the empty sky.

Aboard the train, the rain chips away at the surroundings, at your friends, until that sick thread is exposed and the train finds its feet on it and runs. It is raining inside the cabin now, hard, and between one drop and the next your friends disappear, mass together like water or memories, and the space they occupied is replaced by falling water.

It is raining where you are. It has been raining for a very long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have you read Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken? It’s a short story about a boy who keeps thinking that snow is falling around him. I will say I don’t think it’s a very good short story. Maybe I think about it so much because of that. Anyways – “It’s snowing where I am.”  
> A short film was made out of it, if that’s more your thing: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/silent_snow_secret_snow) (don’t read the reviews they suck lol)  
> also, Doing it to Death by The Kills aesthetics


End file.
